Two Types of Belief Report

Ascriptions of belief and other doxastic propositional attitudes are commonly interpreted as quantifying over a set of possible worlds constituting doxastic alternatives for the belief experiencer. Katz (2000, 2003, 2008) has argued that belief predicates and other stative attitude predicates, along with stative predicates generally, lack a Davidsonian event argument and therefore do not report on any eventuality (event or state). Hacquard (2010), in contrast, assumes that all attitude ascriptions describe an event corresponding to the mental state of the attitude experiencer. The present investigation suggests that the strengths of doxastic predicates can be modeled by generalized quantifiers over the doxastic alternative set, permitting us to formulate and test predictions based on standard interactions of these quantifiers with negation when these ascriptions are negated. This provides a middle ground between Katz and Hacquard, whereby some belief ascriptions are interpreted as nothing more than a quantified condition over a doxastic alternative set, while others attribute a Davidsonian belief state to the experiencer. In the latter case, the condition involving quantification over doxastic alternatives is an essential content condition which serves to individuate the eventuality described by the belief report, and to identify it across possible worlds. References Cappelli, G. 2007. “I reckon I know how Leonardo da Vinci must have felt...” Epistemicity, Evidentiality and English Verbs of Cognitive Attitude. Pari: Pari Publishing. Carlson, G. 1998. ‘Thematic roles and the individuation of events’. In S. Rothstein (ed.) ‘Events and Grammar’, 35–51. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Davidson, D. 1980[1967]. ‘The Logical Form of Action Sentences’. In N. Rescher (ed.) ‘The Logic of Decision and Action’, 81–95. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted in Davidson, D., Essays on Actions and Events, pp. 105-122. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DeRose, K. 1991. ‘Epistemic possibilities’. The Philosophical Review 100: 581–605. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2185175 Eckhardt, R. 2005. ‘Too poor to mention: Subminimal eventualities and negative polarity items’. In C. Maienborn & A. W llstein (eds.) ‘Event Arguments: Foundations and Applications’, 301–330. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Eckhardt, R. 2008. ‘The lower part of event ontology’. In J. D lling, T. Heyde-Zybatow & M. Sch fer (eds.) ‘Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation’, 477–491. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Egan, A. 2005. ‘Epistemic modals, relativism, and assertion’. In J.